Some embodiments described herein relate to determining whether an advertisement served to a mobile device is converted.
An advertisement is converted when a user who views the advertisement takes some action desired by the advertiser, such as, for example, purchasing a product, service, or subscription featured in the advertisement, or engaging in additional research of the product of service, such as visiting the advertisers website or any other action indicative of user engagement with the advertisement. In most cases, the purpose of an advertising campaign is to increase sales by driving consumers to the product. Hence, whether an advertisement is converted is typically a key measure of success of the advertising campaign.
Historically, evaluating the success of an advertising campaign has been extremely difficult. With the development of Internet advertising and techniques such as the tracking cookie, merchants were finally able to collect reliable metrics on an ad-by-ad basis. This influx of data allowed merchants to count each time a user interacted with their ads, and even each time a consumer made a purchase after viewing an advertisement. For the first time, merchants were able to pay only when an advertising impression was converted.
When an advertisement is viewed on a mobile device, however, conversing tracking techniques that were developed for desktop computers may not be adequate. For example, many mobile devices, such as the Apple iPhone® restrict the ability of advertisers to set cookies associated with mobile browsers. Furthermore, the cookie model, which was developed for traditional desktop web browsers, often does not translate to mobile applications, because such mobile applications may not be able to store cookies.
A need therefore exists for systems, methods, and media for mobile advertising conversion attribution.